Transit Union Approves Contract That It Rejected Before

By THOMAS J. LUECK and STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: April 19, 2006

The city's main transit union announced yesterday that its members had overwhelmingly approved the same contract proposal that they narrowly rejected in January, and its leadership demanded that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority now approve the deal.

Like so much else in the labor dispute, which has included a 60-hour transit strike that hobbled the city and the deal's rejection by just seven votes, yesterday's announcement raised as many questions as it answered and did not appear to bring matters any closer to a resolution.

The union's legal standing and the relevance of its revote -- if any -- remained unclear. Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, trumpeted the results and emphatically urged that the authority's board vote on the contract proposal at its meeting next Wednesday.

Mr. Toussaint said the results -- 20,593 of the union's 33,700 members voted, 71 percent of them in favor -- created a ''moral and legal obligation'' for the authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, to call for a board ratification vote.

Local 100 will go to court to force Mr. Kalikow's hand if he does not call for the vote on Wednesday, Mr. Toussaint said.

The authority brushed aside the union's demand yesterday, insisting that it had taken the contract terms off the table after the workers stunned the city by voting them down in January. Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the authority, dismissed the union revote as ''an empty gesture.''

Terry Meginniss, a lawyer for the union, said the transit authority was obligated to ''act on the deal.''

''The deal is to put into effect a new contract,'' he said. ''They can't go in and say they don't like the fact that the union hiccupped and we think the fact that the union hiccupped lets us off the hook and we didn't like the deal in the first place, so we're stepping away from it.''

The union's demand set the stage for a showdown next week.

Local 100 officials said Mr. Toussaint, who has been sentenced to 10 days in jail for his role in the December strike, planned to begin serving the sentence on Monday -- earlier than ordered by the court -- so that he will be in jail when the transit authority board meets next Wednesday. The decision to be in jail at that time appeared to be intended to strike a chord of sympathy with the public.

The results of the second union vote were announced a day after the union was assessed $2.5 million in fines for the strike. Justice Theodore T. Jones of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn ordered the fines and suspended automatic dues check-offs from members' paychecks for at least 90 days, making it difficult for Local 100 to collect its dues and pay its bills. No direct contract negotiations are taking place, and none are scheduled.

After the authority petitioned to have the dispute resolved through binding arbitration, the state's Public Employment Relations Board ordered arbitration, a process that could take months.

Local 100's leadership maintains that binding arbitration is its worst option. But yesterday, Ed Watt, the local's secretary treasurer, said the revote on the previously rejected contract should not be considered as a mechanism to bring both sides back to the bargaining table.

''A contract is a contract,'' he said.

Mr. Toussaint said that the local's original vote was not binding, and that the authority must accept results of the new second vote.

''It is entirely up to the union how and when we ratify a contract,'' Mr. Toussaint said.

David L. Gregory, a labor expert and law professor at St. John's University, said yesterday that there were difficult legal questions about the union's second vote. ''The union argument is innovative,'' he said.

He added that Local 100 ''has an uphill climb on this,'' and said contract law normally dictated that ''when an offer is rejected, it expires.''

Several Democratic officials and transit advocates had urged the authority to allow a second union vote on the contract, and to honor the outcome.

Yesterday, the Straphangers Campaign and HopStop.com, a riders' Web site, said a poll of 757 people conducted from March 30 to April 8 found that 47 percent favored the authority's ratifying the contract if it passed a union revote, and that 37 percent favored binding arbitration. Other respondents favored new negotiations or other alternatives that were not specified.

Even within Local 100, tensions over the contract terms persist, and they erupted after Mr. Toussaint's news conference yesterday.

Two union officials, Marty Goodman and Ainsley Stewart, leaders of a wing of Local 100 that has opposed the contract terms, denounced the revote in speaking to reporters outside the local's headquarters on West End Avenue in Manhattan.

''We are fuming mad out here,'' Mr. Goodman said.

The brief exchange with journalists quickly turned into a shouting match when several other union members allied to Mr. Toussaint appeared and accused the dissident group of lying to other members.

Photo: Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100, announcing the vote's results at union headquarters on West End Avenue yesterday. (Photo by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)(pg. B3)